Neurowar
On the Material Substrate of Psychological Warfare
“Violence, that is to say physical force (for there is no moral force without the conception of states and law), is therefore the means; the compulsory submission of the enemy to our will is the ultimate object.” - Klausewitz
Genghis Khan’s horde used credible threats of slaughter to subdue and conquer villages without a fight. If a settlement refused to capitulate to the Khan, total destruction would ensue upon its capture. A few survivors spread word of the atrocities to neighboring villages, increasing the chances that others would agree to surrender in the future.
Accounts of the effectiveness of psychological warfare date back to the earliest annals of military history. Sun Tzu, Herodotus, and Alexander the Great all mentioned or employed tactics for distracting, intimidating, demoralizing, and traumatizing enemies. Its effectiveness is not merely intangible. Your opponent’s warfighting capacity can be represented as a product of means and will. As either of those variables approaches zero, victory looms closer. If you cannot overpower through means, conquering your opponent’s will to fight will suffice.
As a deterrent or non-combative way of breaking the will of an enemy, psychological warfare’s efficiency is offensive and defensive. Without the need to engage in armed conflict, you prevent the destruction that would come to your own arms and people, while removing the source of threat. For these reasons modern militaries have continued to invest in programs and applications which promise to conquer the enemy in his own mind. As militaries and weapons systems have gotten more sophisticated, so too have the methods for conquering minds.
Embodied Minds
The holy grail of psychological warfare is mind control. You can make the case that psychological warfare in all its instantiations is a category which encompasses varying degrees of mind control. What’s missing from this characterization is the recognition that the separation of body and mind we inherit from Cartesian Dualism overlooks the fact that the material substrate of any notion of mind control is irrevocably embedded in a physical body. Therefore, the issue at hand is not to achieve control of the abstract psychological construct of a mind, but of a nervous system. If, as Klausewitz says, the ultimate object of war is the “submission of the enemy to our will”, then what this translates to materially is a specific agent’s nervous system being either incapable of, or disinterested in, resisting.
Neurowar is a term which takes proper account of the embodied nature of minds in the conception of psychological warfare. While a mind constitutes aspects of psychology, cognition, identity, and perception, expressing this mode of conflict in terms of a nervous system gives a more concrete, non-abstract, and material basis from which to explore the ways certain stimuli give rise to behavior directing an organism to a course of action in alignment with certain military objectives.
Everything from weather, to equipment, to religion and social systems, to local cultures, to propaganda, as well as chemical, electrical, computational, and pharmaceutical interventions, can be understood in terms of their effect on the neurology of an opponent. For this reason, we can take knowledge gained from the out-of-fashion, though practically-minded, school of Behaviorism, which dominated psychological research in the first half of the 20th century, as a starting point for understanding the relationship of nervous system inputs to behavior.
Old Dogs Unlearning New Tricks
Learned helplessness is a phenomenon where an organism fails to respond to, or attempt to escape from, an adverse stimulus. This nonresponse is conditioned through arbitrary, unavoidable, and unpredictable shocks which degrade an agent’s sense of control or self-efficacy. In American psychologist Martin Seligman’s original experiments on learned helplessness, 3 groups of dogs were put through 2 phases of experimentation. In the first phase a group would be put into a harness, then released. The second group would be harnessed, then delivered electric shocks at random intervals, which they could alleviate by pressing a lever. Dogs in the third group would each be paired with a member of the second group, receive the shock for the same intensity and duration simultaneously to its pair in the second group, but pressing the lever did not stop the shocks. Phase 2 involved placing the dogs in a chamber bifurcated with a short partition where one side was electrified and the other not. Dogs from groups 1 and 2 responded as expected upon receiving a shock, and would jump over to the other side of the chamber. Group 3 dogs, however, would mostly just lay down and whimper. Further experiments later showed that once engrained, this behavior could only be corrected through interventions where researchers physically moved the helpless dogs’ legs, replicating the behavior required to escape the shocks. Subsequent threats, rewards, and even demonstrations, had no effect.
Despite some experimental validity, the early theory of learned helplessness got it backwards. It is not that the dogs in Group 3 “learned” helplessness, but rather that they unlearned agency. Later developments revealed that conscious agents first learn to move away from negative stimuli and toward positive stimuli through exposure, conditioning, and imitation, rather than coming equipped with an external locus of control. Gradually, as an animal or infant acquires experiences of mastery over their environment, their perception of how it can be favorably manipulated increases. What this means is that reversion to a state of helplessness is a kind of unlearning. Psychologically speaking, learned helplessness is a regression to an earlier stage of development.
CIA on Its Worst Behavior
Learned helplessness research later became the basis for the CIA’s Enhanced Interrogation Techniques. Military psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jensen, who architected the CIA’s interrogation program during the War on Terror, cited Seligman’s work as potentially useful for eliminating prisoners’ “sense of control and predictability”, thereby inducing “a desired level of helplessness”, according to a U.S. Senate report. The point of initiating regression in a subject is to force them to relinquish their sense of control, thereby allowing for the interrogators to serve as surrogates for the security and safety they yearn for, and which is characteristic of the dynamic between a child and their caregiver in the early stages of undifferentiated development. The necessity of inducing such a dynamic in prisoners was understood long before the early 20th century, however. In 1963, the CIA’s “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation” manual stated that the “response to coercion typically contains ‘.. at least three important elements: debility, dependency, and dread.’ Prisoners ‘... have reduced viability, are helplessly dependent on their captors for the satisfaction of their many basic needs’.” This positioning can facilitate a relation similar to Stockholm Syndrome, where the dependence on captors for their survival, combined with a surrender to feelings of helplessness and despair, lead to the adoption of an adaptive strategy of attachment and bonding; which is sometimes so effective that it opens vulnerabilities allowing for eventual escape. For a captive to be willing to do so, of course, relies on the regaining of a semblance of control, something that an uncalculating interrogator or captor could enable if they are not wary of the potential for such a reversal. Academics asked about this program have denied the efficacy of such coercive tactics for retrieving useful information or gaining genuine compliance. In part, because the mechanisms underlying such phenomena are not well understood, and because such research is not easily amenable to the dignity of human rights, there is room for more investigation and confirmation on this front. Our theories and methods of mind control remain rudimentary (for now).
This phenomenon (of mind control) has not gone unseen in nature. Neuroparasitology is a field that studies the way parasitic organisms manipulate the nervous systems of hosts. Insects, being the most studied sites of host-parasite nervous system interactions, show manipulation of complex behavior can come from deceptively simple creatures.
The notorious cordycep fungi hijacks an ant’s body by diffusing its spores through the ant’s tracheae, whereupon its micelia grow inside the ant, feasting on non-vital organs for a time, before causing, through some unknown chemical or electrical influence, its host to climb high up a tree or plant, bite onto a leaf and stay there until the fungus eats its brain, killing it, and releasing its spores on the area below. Despite numerous examples of other such sinister manipulation of host organisms abound, this class of organisms’ mechanisms of control are not well understood, and Evolution still keeps many of her mysteries. What these missing pieces of natural mind control puzzles indicate is that there are varied ways by which an organism can be influenced through manipulation of its nervous system to do all kinds of things against its natural interest.
The other side of this coin, which I will explore in future posts, is the application of neurowarfare techniques and methods to enhance one’s own side. Various methods and practices, from metaphysical beliefs, to music, warpaint, uniforms, chanting, nationalist propaganda, and drugs have all been employed to prepare soldiers for battle, to martial virile wills in service of a cause, enhance physical and cognitive functioning under stress, and improve morale. Whether, and to what degree, one is in a sense brainwashing their own people in service of a war, particularly where modernized industrial-scale war is concerned, remains an open question.
The neurology of a people is the coordination of chemical-electrical signals among and between its conscious agents.
https://www.clausewitz.com/readings/OnWar1873/BK1ch01.html
https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/fm3-05-301.pdf
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00572/full
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/CIA%20Kubark%201-60.pdf